The Greenspanaissance

Summary

Slate Money: "The Greenspanaissance" (June 27, 2026)

Podcast Episode Summary

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Episode Overview

In this episode of Slate Money, host Felix Salmon (Bloomberg), joined by Emily Peck (Axios) and Elizabeth Spiers (New York Times), explore the multifaceted legacy of Alan Greenspan following his recent passing. The team draws connections between Greenspan's tenure and current economic debates, dives into the shifting narrative around his leadership, and examines the ongoing issues of corporate succession planning (with a focus on JPMorgan Chase). They also discuss SoftBank’s legendary CEO Masa Son and his outlandish claims about value creation, and reflect on broader trends in management, regulation, and technology in finance.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The "Greenspanaissance" – Rethinking Alan Greenspan’s Legacy

• Theme: With Greenspan’s death at age 100, the panel reflects on how perceptions of his legacy have shifted—from initial widespread condemnation post-2008, to a more nuanced, revisionist view.
• Central Question: Was Greenspan’s impact ultimately positive or negative for the U.S. and global financial systems?

The Dual Mandate: Successes and Failings

• Greenspan succeeded with respect to the Federal Reserve's central mandates: low unemployment, low inflation, and possibly, low long-term interest rates ([04:47]).
• Data-driven, "nerdy" leadership style; relied on evidence, and famously obscure in communication.
  • "If you understood what I'm saying, you probably misunderstood me." – Attributed to Greenspan ([04:47])
• Noted for being willing to take politically unpopular stances for the sake of economic policy, notably hiking rates in 1994 despite opposition ([07:21]).
• During the dot-com bubble, allowed markets to "let it rip" based on the belief that productivity gains would prevent inflation, a rationale now echoed with the rise of AI ([05:47], [06:26]).

The Regulatory Blindspot

• Consensus among panelists: Greenspan’s main failing was as a bank regulator. He believed markets—and reputational incentives—would police themselves, which proved disastrously false ([10:23], [10:45]).
  • "He was very laissez-faire. He was an Ayn Rand disciple... [believed] there would be no that. If risk takers lose money, that's salutary and is not going to cause any major disruption. All of that was false." – Felix ([10:45])
• Greenspan himself acknowledged this regulatory failure after-the-fact ([10:45]).
• Panel notes this mindset allowed risky behavior in the run-up to the 2008 crisis, as he overestimated the self-regulation capacity of Wall Street ([11:42]).

Bubbles, Lessons Unlearned, and the "Put"

• "Bubbles are fine" thesis: Greenspan applied lessons from the dot-com era (where equity holders took losses without systemic collapse) to later crises, misjudging the contagious threat of debt-fueled bubbles ([15:27], [17:17]).
• The "Greenspan put": By bailing out Long-Term Capital Management, Greenspan is seen to have instilled an expectation that the Fed would always step in, encouraging riskier behavior ([15:40]).

Current-Day Echoes

• New Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh is seen as a Greenspan disciple, emphasizing the relevance of productivity gains (now via AI rather than globalization/immigration) as an economic driver, despite vastly changed structural conditions ([06:26]).
• Skepticism about whether the Fed can (or should) pop equity bubbles; consensus is they should focus on their dual mandate ([17:28]-[18:00]).

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2. Succession, Gerontocracy, and “Too Big to Leave” at JPMorgan

• Theme: How do corporate giants like JPMorgan manage leadership transitions—especially when a legendary CEO, Jamie Dimon, refuses to step aside?
• Dimon has remained in charge for decades, leading to repeated cycles where would-be heirs get replaced or depart ([29:32]-[31:28]).
  • "Jamie Dimon is always around for another five years, in much the same way as the Iran war is gonna be over in two weeks." – Felix ([31:13])
  • "If he could live forever, [the board] would want him to be CEO forever. He's the best." – Felix ([31:14])
• Pros & cons: While Dimon's leadership is valued, the lack of a clear succession plan creates vulnerability.
• The executive chairman “white whale”: Felix vehemently criticizes the practice, as it undermines the independence of a new CEO ([31:54]-[33:49]).
• The broader issue of aging leaders ("gerontocracy")—CEO ages have been trending up; is this a problem? The team debates norms and organizational health ([34:13]-[37:31]).
  • Arguments for/against older CEOs: more experience and steadiness vs. need for renewal and opportunities for next-generation talent ([37:31]-[38:34]).
  • Contrast: hired “manager” CEOs (often older) vs. younger “founder” CEOs ([38:38]).

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3. SoftBank’s Masa Son: Laying (and Buying) Golden Eggs

• Theme: Masa Son, SoftBank CEO, delivered another viral, idiosyncratic investor presentation, describing himself—and SoftBank—as the "goose that lays golden eggs."
• Masa Son’s latest deck:
  • Opens with: "I was going to retire, and now, fuck that shit." – Slide deck quote recapped by Felix ([42:14])
  • Outlandish self-comparison: Claims SoftBank's market value should exceed its sum-of-parts because he (the goose) will lay even more lucrative eggs ([44:02]-[44:59]).
  • Long-term vision: SoftBank is positioning for an “artificial superintelligence” future, betting big on humanoid robots and massive value creation ([48:15]).
  • The market, however, still prices SoftBank at a discount to its holdings, implying skepticism about Son’s future acumen ([46:16]-[46:50]).
• Egg metaphor dissected: Panel notes SoftBank doesn't “lay” eggs so much as “buy” them, and points to examples like WeWork (a “stinky egg”) ([45:10]-[46:01]).
• Acclaims Son’s whimsical, almost poetic, presentation style: "They're like little poems." – Emily ([50:30]).
• At the meta-level, SoftBank’s and Nvidia’s roles in the current AI revolution highlight the blurred lines between creators and financiers in the “egg” metaphor ([49:38]-[50:13]).

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4. Regulation Today: Shadows, Offshores, and the Next Bubble

• Bank Regulation Malaise: Despite post-crisis improvements (Basel III), panelists lament the current lack of vigilance across global regulators ([22:22], [23:38]).
• Shadow risk: As banks became more regulated, risk has migrated to other, less-regulated parts of the financial system—offshore entities, shadow banking, and new levered products ([23:38]).
• Prediction markets, crypto, and new finance: All noted as examples of under-regulated, booming sectors, though judged not (yet) systemic in scale ([21:24]).
  • "There's all kinds of new products...all this offshore stuff...prediction markets...All of this stuff is very low hanging fruit and shouldn't be allowed and is allowed and is a problem. I don't think that any of it is macroeconomically important or systemic. It's just too small." – Felix ([21:24]-[22:10])

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5. Memorable Quotes & Moments

• "If you understood what I'm saying, you probably misunderstood me." – Elizabeth quoting Greenspan ([04:44])
• "The lesson he learned from the dot com bubble was bubbles are probably fine and no one gets hurt. And then we all unlearned that lesson pretty hard in 2008..." – Emily ([15:27])
• "In the dot com bubble, the people taking risk knew that they were taking risk. In the housing bubble, the people taking risk were like homeowners who couldn't afford to take risk..." – Felix ([14:45])
• "Jamie Dimon is always around for another five years, in much the same way as the Iran war is gonna be over in two weeks." – Felix ([31:13])
• "What matters is not the eggs. Eggs don't lay eggs. These are facts." – Emily ([45:10])
• "I was going to retire, and now, fuck that shit." – Masa Son via slide deck, recounted by Felix ([42:14])
• "They're like little poems." – Emily, on Son’s slides ([50:30])

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 03:46: Launch of Greenspan segment / "Greenspanaissance" term introduced
• 04:44: Greenspan’s communication style—famous quote
• 07:21: Fed leadership, monetary policy, comparison to current Fed Chair
• 10:45: Greenspan’s regulatory failure and self-admitted error
• 15:40: Greenspan “put” and Long-Term Capital Management
• 17:28: Debt vs. equity bubbles—Fed’s limited toolkit
• 29:32: JPMorgan/Dimon succession drama
• 31:54: Critique of “executive chairman” roles
• 34:13: Senior leadership age and the gerontocracy debate
• 42:14: Masa Son’s slide deck, the golden eggs metaphor
• 44:59: Should the market pay a “Masa premium”?
• 45:10: The “not laying eggs, buying eggs” metaphor explained
• 48:15: Masa Son’s future bet: artificial superintelligence and humanoid robots
• 50:30: Praise for whimsy in investor slides
• 54:48: Numbers round (Deutsche Bahn punctuality, Ryanair’s “child tax,” Apple’s AI-induced price hikes)

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Tone & Style

The tone is witty, sharp, and conversational, with an irreverent approach to financial orthodoxy and a frequent use of pop-culture references to Succession, Silicon Valley, and even children's fables. The hosts leverage deep knowledge yet focus on the practical, the political, and the human—all while making obvious space for disagreement and skepticism.

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Conclusion

This episode delivers a critical, sometimes playful, but ultimately rich exploration of how leadership—whether at the Fed, a megabank, or a tech conglomerate—shapes financial history, regulation, and our collective understanding of value. While the show’s mood is often light, the analysis is incisive, conveying key issues at the heart of today’s market debates and corporate boardrooms.

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For further reading:

• Masa Son’s viral slide deck (see show notes)
• Eric Loomis’ substack critique of Greenspan (mentioned at [24:33])

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Summary prepared for Slate Money listeners and non-listeners alike to capture the full arc, analysis, and flavor of "The Greenspanaissance."

Transcript

[A]

Hello and welcome to Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week. I'm Felix Salmon of Bloomberg. I'm here with Emily Peck of Axios.

[B]

Hello.

[C]

Hello.

[D]

I'm here with Elizabeth Spires of New York Times.

[B]

Hello.

[A]

And we are going to talk about

[D]

the maestro, Alan Greenspan, RIP what is his legacy? What did he do right? What did he do wrong? And of course, since we are massive fans of succession here at Slate Money,

[A]

we're going to talk about succession and

[D]

succession planning at companies in general and at JP Morgan in particular. We are going to talk about another maestro in its own way, Masa Son, a softbank, and the eggs that he lays because in a way, he's a goose. We also have a Slate plus segment on Wendy's and Hurts.

[A]

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[E]

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[D]

so Emily, you have coined my favorite word of the week, which is greenspanassance. The greenspanassance Greenspan is having a renaissance. He's only been dead for a couple of days and he's already been reborn. He did die this week at the age of 100. He had a good innings. I like to say that he died slightly above PAR at about 100.21 I think, which is apropos. And now his Would it be fair to say that Kevin Walsh is a Greenspan disciple?

[C]

I think it would be fair to say that, yes.

[A]

So the new head of the central

[D]

bank is very much formed in Greenspan's image and has certainly taken a leaf out of Greenspan's inscrutability book. Greenspan famously said that if you understood what I'm saying, you probably misunderstood me or something worse to that effect.

[B]

If it sounded clear, you probably misunderstood me.

[D]

But in any case, yeah, we should talk a little bit about his legacy because this has been certainly a sort of big topic of conversation around the Bloomberg water cooler. Greenspan, good or bad? I think 10 years ago or 15 years ago, in the immediate wake of the financial crisis, it would have been unambiguously bad. He set the stage for the greatest financial crisis to afflict the planet since 1931. But I also think that as you say that people are re rating him, there's a little bit of revisionism going on. And it is true that in terms of the mandate of the Fed, which is low unemployment and low inflation and then possibly a third mandate of low long term interest rates, he kind of nailed all three for the entire term of his office, which was a very long term.

[C]

I think that you are right that the Trump administration in particular Scott Bessen and now Kevin Warsh want to reframe the conversation about Greenspan. And I think the thing they particularly are highlighting is that during the.com bubble Greenspan didn't act to raise rates and quash the excitement because he argued the dot com bubble wasn't going to be inflationary because of something, something productivity, productivity gains. And so he like, let it rip. And they're like, the same thing's gonna happen with AI. AI is gonna lead to productivity gains. And just, let's just let it rip kind of a vibe.

[B]

So I feel like this is another instance of maybe coincidentally, Warsh being stuck in the late 80s, early 90s, because there are things that Greenspan was dealing with structurally that Warsh is just in a totally different environment. And one is that it was okay for Greenspan to be largely inscrutable when he was communicating with people, in part because they just didn't have this 247 news cycle that we have now where information is really ubiquitous. And not having it creates maybe an outsized amount of uncertainty that it wouldn't have during Greenspan's early tenure. But the other thing is, if Warsh is sort of anticipating that he can account for productivity gains because of AI, the other two things that caused productivity gains during Greenspan's tenure were an influx of Mexican migrants and globalization. And those are two things that the Trump administration is either rolling back or trying to extract itself from.

[D]

I think I agree with the second much more than the first. I don't worry about less communication from the Fed. I think the markets can cope just fine with less communication from the Fed. I do think you're right that Walsh does kind of feel sometimes, or at least he was during his audition period for Fed chair, as though he was trying to sort of work backwards and find reasons to feed Dalvation want to cut rates. Now that he is Fed chair, we have to sort of give him the benefit of the doubt. I think, and I do, as I have mentioned on this show before, I do think the next Fed move is going to be a hike rather than the cut. It is worth noting that Greenspan. Part of what made Greenspan respectable in the eyes of the market was that he was willing to hike in the face of political opposition. Right. In 94, he hiked because he saw inflation coming down the road before inflation had arrived. And everyone kind of went, oh, my God, that was very prescient. And you did the right thing. And it was politically unpopular and George H.W. bush blamed you for losing the election to Clinton and all of this kind of stuff. So, like, Greenspan does have a certain amount of inflation fighting bonafides in the way that Walsh does. Not yet. And if Walsh starts off with a hiking cycle, maybe that will get him somewhere there. But the big point about the Greenspan's failure to hike rates during the dot com bubble was that on a very profound way, on a very profound level, he was right. Like, he was right that there was productivity. He was right that there was no inflation. He was right that you could keep rates low. You could ignore the Phillips curve, which says that if unemployment is too low, then inflation rises and for various reasons inflation wouldn't arise. And he was, if nothing else, he was very nerdy and data driven. He would spend weeks and weeks sitting in his office with printouts of macroeconomic data and he'd talk to people and he would go where the evidence led him to a very large degree. And the evidence led him to believe that there wasn't actually inflationary pressure and he kept rates low. And that was the other big thing that he, I think correctly got credit for.

[C]

Okay, so there's all this revisionist history now and there's, as you call it, a rerating and everyone's going back to the dot com bubble because that feels like the most relevant comparison to today. And I think we're doing a little bit of like 2008 erasure or amnesia where like we're like pandemic braining it or something. Because like you said, Felix, for a long time everyone was like, brother, Greenspan really cocked it up on this one. And I think a lot of former Fed people talk about it. He really, he thought Wall street, his big theory was Wall street would regulate itself because they were concerned about their reputation. There are many quotes from him saying

[D]

not just their reputation, but their share price.

[C]

Their share price. Obviously they can police themselves and it's totally fine. And the Federal Reserve, yes, it has its mandates on unemployment and on inflation, on prices, but it also is a bank regulator. And I think the consensus was and still is that they did not do their job. They did not do their job.

[D]

And by the way, that's not just the consensus of you and me. This is also something that Queenspan himself admitted that he fucked that one up. He was actually okay, he was arguably good when it came to monetary policy. We can talk about whether his, his monetary policy in the early 2000s after the dot com bust helped to create the bubble that then created the financial crisis. But broadly speaking, in terms of his monetary policy mandate of low unemployment and low inflation, he nailed that one. But he totally fucked up in terms of the bank regulation side of things. He was very laissez faire. He was an Ayn Rand disciple and he believed that everyone who was taking risk, was knowingly taking risk, and that there would be no that. If risk takers lose money, that's salutary and is not going to cause any major disruption. All of that was false.

[B]

It's also kind of strange that he got that wrong. Not because it makes sense in the context of his sort of libertarian beliefs and this idea that the banks were going to regulate themselves, but he also had a reputation for digging deep into esoteric data and talking to people on the ground to sort of inform his viewpoint. And I think even before he was out of Fed chair position, you know, there were some emerging things that were happening in the data that other people kind of spotted. And some of the anecdotally the things that were happening were we were seeing these foreclosures happening where people had just borrowed too much money and they couldn't pay it back. And that seems like exactly the kind of thing that historically would have been on Greenspan's radar. So I don't know really understand how he missed it.

[D]

Well, I mean, like, again, to be clear, think of, think of this in terms of Greenspan as a Fed chair who cares much more about monetary policy than he does about bank regulation. If you are looking at data and worrying that foreclosures are going up at the margin, what that does is it encourages you to keep rates low. Right, which is basically what he was doing, because lower interest rates mean freer money and more liquidity and basically less damage to the lending markets. The foreclosures turned out to be a canary in the coal mine in terms of regulation of the financial sector, which is something where he totally had his eye off the ball. And we can agree on that. But in terms of monetary policy, because, yeah, when he was looking at data, he was looking at data in terms of how is the economy doing, what are the risks to the economy, how hot is it running, how cool is it running? And that kind of thing. And if he's seeing foreclosures begin to rise, and they didn't really spike until Bernanke came in, but if he's seeing foreclosures begin to rise, then he's like, well, this only reinforces my idea that I should keep rates low. And in fact, what was happening was that the low rates were causing this sort of liquidity glut that was creating an enormous amount of excess risk taking in the financial markets. And a lot of that risk was being held in places by Norwegian sovereign wealth funds or German banks who didn't know that they were holding the risk they thought they were holding AAA rated securities and it turned out they were holding nuclear waste and we don't need to relitigate the entire financial crisis. But yes, he did miss that. But at that point also maybe it was kind of too late. What it's not obvious what he could or should have done at that point.

[C]

You really want maybe all along he should have. All along he should have situation all

[D]

along he should have cared more about bank regulation and he certainly didn't care enough about bank regulation. That is true.

[C]

Like the flip side of he didn't care about bank regulation and also had talked about like bubbles are fine actually like that's one of his things.

[D]

And by the way that was his experience during the dot com bubble, right? Which was stocks went up, everything seemed great, stocks went down, he cut interest rates, a few people lost money in the stock market but there was no real recession at all and you could just keep on going. And he was like we have the monetary tools to cope with a bubble bursting. If the only risk in the, if the housing bubble behaved like the dot com bubble, that would have not been a problem. In the dot com bubble the people taking risk knew that they were taking risk. In the housing bubble the people taking risk were like homeowners who couldn't afford to take risk and conservative investors who thought they were buying AAA securities and all of the rest of it. And that was the big difference.

[C]

The lesson he learned from the dot com bubble was bubbles are probably fine and no one gets hurt. And then we all unlearned that lesson pretty hard in 2008 and now I think we're in maybe another bubble and it's like what lessons?

[B]

Well, another part of Greenspan's legacy that's maybe not so great is that when he bailed out Long Term Capital Management he kind of set a precedent in the minds of people on Wall street that if something bad happens, the Fed will just clean it up. And that's why people began to call this the Greenspan put because the idea was, well if the institutions don't self regulate and there's a problem, the Fed will bail them out. Which turned out to be exactly what happened.

[D]

I think calling it a bailout is maybe a little bit of a stretch. Basically what happened was that all of the big banks in New York were called down to the New York Fed. And the New York Fed was involved in this and as it should be is the main bank regulator in New York. And they were basically told, you guys need to find a bunch of Cash to bail out ltcm. And they basically said, fuck off, we'll let it fail. And a lot of arms were twisted and eventually they did, but it wasn't, it's not what the Fed did there was it used what's known as moral suasion to basically persuade a bunch of bankers to do something they didn't want to do. And I think that is exactly the right thing that it should have done that.

[C]

But what I was trying to say before was just that we're in a, probably in a bubble now and all the people in charge are looking at that 2000.com bubble and thinking and taking those lessons away and suggesting the Fed act in the way it did for the 2000 bubble, which maybe that's fine because as you say, the people who took risks lost money, but no one else did. But I don't think you can really know that until everything washes out.

[D]

I think, I think you can actually, like, here's my, here's my sort of rule of thumb here, right. Which is the equity bubbles are relatively harmless and debt bubbles are very dangerous.

[C]

Okay.

[D]

And this is clearly an equity bubble.

[B]

Okay, wasn't the dot com boom an equity bubble too?

[D]

Yes, exactly.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

And the equity.

[C]

But the argument is it wasn't harmful systemically.

[B]

Well, it wasn't as harmful as the credit crisis. No. But I think the idea that it wasn't harmful is not correct.

[D]

The idea is that the Federal Reserve does not have the ability to prevent bubbles from happening. Greenspan, if you look at his record, did actually try a couple of times when he thought the stock markets were too frothy. He kind of raised rates a little bit more than maybe the inflationary outlook would have suggested because he's like, look, there's irrational exuberance in the market. And when he made his irrational exuberance comments, the markets fell, but then they bounced back literally the following day and he realized that trying to use interest rate monetary policy to burst a stock market bubble is, A, it's ineffectual, it doesn't work, and B, it kind of means that you're taking your eye off the main ball, which is your dual mandate. So I think broadly speaking, he gave up at that point on trying to worry too much about stock market bubbles. And I do agree that right now the Fed consensus is there's not much we can do and probably not much we should do about the stock market bubble. But I'm interested, Elizabeth, in what you think, let's say ex hypothesis, there is a stock market bubble, right? Now and let's say that the Elizabeth Spires Fed is worried about it. What do you do to address it? What is your policy response?

[B]

I mean I'm not sure what you do, but I can see levers that might affect it. Like I think a raised interest rates that suck some of the air out of the debt that these AI companies are taking on now.

[A]

That's my point.

[D]

We tried raising interest rates during the dot com bubble. It didn't have that much effect. If you look at where interest rates are right now, they're not that low.

[B]

That's true. But was the first dot com bubble as heavily debt laden? I think of that as almost a purely equity bubble.

[D]

It was almost purely an equity bubble but then again so is this one. There is more debt. I mean just the orders of magnitude of everything are much bigger now than they were in the 1990s. But if you look at the asset prices that are too high, it's all equity. The amount of people worrying. I feel like we're now sort of six months on from people worried about private debt and all of that kind of stuff. Private credit. Is there a little bit of people taking known risks in the AI space who could lose some money if everything goes fair shape? Sure there is, but I don't think there would be sort of massive macroeconomic consequences to those people losing money.

[C]

Maybe to refine what I was saying, I don't know if the Fed can use monetary policy to address an equity bubble but what I said before holds now maybe even more so. And that's when Greenspan was running things. He really fell down in his responsibility to do regulation of the banks because based on his free market theory, whatever, right now we have an administration that is profoundly anti regulation of the financial industry and there's all kinds of stuff going on in the financial industry, maybe not in the banks specifically. So maybe the Fed can't do anything about this. There's all kinds of new products coming down the pike that are using a lot of lever. There's all this offshore stuff happening, you know, with hyper liquid. We've talked about who knows what else shenanigans are going on. Prediction markets are booming. Everyone has a prediction market now. I think Facebook wants to have one. I don't know what that's about. Something surely needs to be taken a look at. Right?

[D]

Yeah. And if I was.

[C]

This can't be good.

[D]

And if I was in charge of emerged Sec cftc because obviously those two should be merged. Yeah. The first thing I would do is I would start Cracking down on Cauchy and Polymarket, I would start cracking down on crypto. I would start cracking down on people using VPNs to do a bunch of trades that are illegal in the US but they're all Americans. All of this stuff is very low hanging fruit and shouldn't be allowed and is allowed and is a problem. I don't think that any of it is macroeconomically important or systemic. It's just too small. It's big in terms of, oh, billions here and billions there, but it's too small to affect the economy.

[C]

I agree, but I'm also like, something's got to happen here.

[F]

What?

[C]

Things are bananas, but I don't know. Things were bananas in 2021. The stock market fell in 2022.

[D]

Frankly, like, I worry about bank regulation too. I think there's way too little bank regulation right now. And we recently this week had not quite a bank failure, but a major bank scandal in Germany where a bank that has been around since 1590, Debafin, the German financial regulator, they basically fired the top three executives, including the CEO and said we're replacing you because you are terrible and late. It's Baffin clearly had its eye off the ball and didn't know and panicked. And I don't think I can't name a good bank regulator anywhere on the planet right now. Bank regulation is definitely in a fallow period. The thing that gives me a little bit of reassurance is that we're still close enough to Basel III and the golden era of bank regulation following the financial crisis that a whole bunch of safeguards were put around the banking system that is still there. And if we don't tend those safeguards, things will leak out and it will get more dangerous slowly over time. But they're still strong enough for the time being that I'm not worried that the banks are going to be the cause of any crisis anytime soon.

[C]

No, I feel like, if anything, like all the golden age of regulation you just talked about pushed whatever shenanigans the banks may have been doing into other weird corners. Y maybe that's good. I don't know.

[D]

I think that is good because as we all know, bank failures are much more systemically dangerous than any other failure of a financial institution. Because if a bank fails, then depositors don't get their money back and depositors are risk free, information insensitive, yada yada. I think maybe we've come to a sort of general consensus here that Greenspan, his main failure was on the regulatory side. Rather than on the monetary policy side.

[C]

Sure. And also liking Do I say your name right now?

[B]

Ayn Rand.

[C]

Ayn Rand. There's a good substack that was, I thought, fun to read because I had just finished reading like all the laudatory obituaries of Alan Greenspan and I'm sure he was a nice man and everything and he was married to Andrea Mitchell.

[G]

Whatever.

[C]

But this post sub stack from Eric Loomis just really takes the whole thing down and I enjoyed reading it. It reminded me of the old days of blogs.

[B]

I will counterintuitively say something nice about Alan Greenspan, which is that he was part of the Gates Commission, which eliminated the compulsory draft, which I agree with,

[C]

but was that good? Really? Elizabeth

[B]

yes, Emily.

[C]

I don't know. Shouldn't the citizens have a stake in Isn't that a key part of democracy? If people really care about going to war, we wouldn't go to so many

[B]

stuff and we vote the state Slow

[D]

rightward drift of Emily Peck is something

[C]

if rich people had to send their kids to war, we would not be in Iran at all.

[B]

Well, that they can either pay more taxes or send a kid to war. They can pick one.

[C]

I mean some rich people have a lot of kids. Do you know what I'm saying?

[B]

I'll just leave it there.

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[A]

Emily,

[D]

what would you like to talk about next?

[C]

Well, you spoke of bank regulation and Too big to fail. The biggest bank on the planet is going through some turmoil right now, so we could talk about that.

[D]

If you want to be the biggest bank in the western world.

[C]

Is there a bigger bank than JPMorgan

[D]

Chase in terms of assets? I think a couple of Chinese banks are bigger. Yeah.

[H]

China.

[D]

China.

[A]

But yeah.

[D]

So Jamie Dimon, insofar as there was an heir apparent at JP Morgan, it was Marianne Lake and Jamie Dimon and or the board, we don't know exactly, basically took her to one side and said, yeah, no. And so she peaced out. And now another couple of men have been promoted. So there's a new bake off for title of heir apparent. It's either gonna be like one guy who's in charge of the investment bank or the other guy who's in charge of the commercial bank.

[C]

Doug and Troy.

[D]

Doug and Troy. With a small chance that it might still be like one of the two other Women.

[B]

Jen or Mary or Jen.

[D]

Mary.

[C]

No, Mary's out.

[D]

No, Mary's not.

[B]

No, no, Mary AG is out.

[D]

Mary Erdos is in the third part of the bank, which is wealth management. And she, by all accounts, is doing a good job there. And she's kind of the dark horse, but. Yeah. The point here is that Jamie Dimon has been there for, I believe the technical term is forever. And it's very hard to do succession planning when you outlast all of your potential successes. There have been at least a dozen heirs apparent over the decades. And everyone's like, well, Jamie says he's gonna be around for the next five years. So in five years time, Daniel Pinto is gonna take over whoever the heir apparent is that week. And then five years later, Jamie Dimon's like, I'll be here for about another five years. Because Jamie Dimon is always around for another five years in much the same way as the Iran war is gonna be over in two weeks. You know, it's like it's just a rolling time thing. And eventually these people either just get sick of waiting or realize it's never gonna happen, and so they get replaced. Or Jamie just gets bored of them because they've been around for so long, and they wind up shuffling off to run some other bank somewhere or count their millions or whatever it is they do when they leave JP Morgan and someone else cycles in. And the question basically that faces the board of JP Morgan is a pretty simple one. They're basically saying, we love Jamie Dimon. If he could live forever, we would want him to be CEO forever. He's the best. He's the greatest. If he wants to cycle through a range of potential successes while he stays in charge, then he's in charge, and that's good. And succession planning is important, but it's less important than keeping Jamie happy for as long as he wants to be happy. And so I think what they've done is they've made a very conscious decision that this is bad for succession planning, but it's good for the company because Jamie is good for the company.

[B]

Yeah, I think you can sort of understand their dilemma because he's 70, which is not, you know, is fairly yuck in terms of when we see CEOs retiring right now, and he seems, you know, he doesn't particularly want to leave. He's doing a good job. There's. It's. And it's always going to be an inflection point when they do finally hand the reins over, that involves some risk. So if you're on the board. You kind of do want him to stay as long as he possibly can while he's still doing a great job.

[D]

He has also said explicitly that when he steps down as CEO, he will remain as executive Chairman. And this as long term Slate Money listeners will know, is my great white whale. I hate this job of executive chairman. I think no one should have the job of executive Chairman. And if you are the CEO of JPMorgan Chase and Jamie Dimon is executive chairman, which means he is the chairman of the board, which means he is your boss, then you are not the chief executive. Jamie Dimon is still the chief executive. He is executive chairman. He's not just a chairman, he's an executive chairman, therefore he's an executive and he's your boss of the CEO, therefore he is the chief. You know.

[B]

Anyway, is this what happened with Bob Iger? Was he the chief executive and then he got bounced back into the job whenever the succession.

[D]

Yes. Sometimes the executive chairman comes back and kicks out the replacement CEO and comes back to be CEO a second time. Sometimes they don't, but either way they're breathing down the neck of the CEO and the CEO does not really have full range of motion and the ability to actually own decision making in the way that a CEO should. So I hate the executive chairman idea. Hate, hate, hate. No one should be executive chairman. It's a terrible job.

[C]

What about just for like a month or something, just to make sure everything goes well in the transition? Just that happens.

[D]

That's called chairman. That's why they make the distinction between executive chairman and chairman. That the executive chairman has a day job running bits of the company rather than just sitting on the board and overseeing the CEO. I'm okay with chairman. I just don't want it to be anything I don't want because the minute the chairman has executive responsibility and can actually tell underlings what to do, like other than just the CEO, everything goes sideways because the underlings don't know who to report to.

[C]

A more zoomed out thing is Jamie Dimon, Boomer, age 70, won't retire. This is a problem that people like to complain about economy wide, right? Old people getting older as they do and refusing to retire and get out of the way of the next generation. And that seems to be part of what's happening here. Jamie Dimon is 70 years old.

[D]

He's the David Remnick of JP Morgan.

[C]

I mean, and the Doug and Troy. Doug is 61 and Troy is 56. So they're not exactly spring chickens. They're, they're Also, I think 56 is like cuspy boomer or not sure, but

[D]

56 is still gen X, like Marianne Lake was. Or is 56, like, she can still. She is already juggling a whole bunch of job offers. She's going to do something big.

[C]

She'll be fine. We're not worried about her. Even though she didn't get the little $30 million retention bonus that everyone else got. Very nice, by the way. Do we think that you gotta go if you're 70? What do you guys think? Do you think the boomers just gotta get the hell out?

[D]

So we were talking a little bit about who did succession planning. Well, and the first thing as we've discussed is people who are willing to quit while they're ahead and don't want to just hold on for dear life as long as they can. So like James Gorman at Morgan Stanley, It's a good example of that. Like, Morgan Stanley was doing fine. He's like, yep, I have this heir apparent, Ted Pick. He's good. I can let him take over. I don't need to be here forever. That is good. You need a certain sort of selflessness to do that.

[C]

Tim Cook, 65, he was like, okay.

[D]

But the flip side of that is, on some level, Warren Buffett, who stayed in charge into his 90s, also had a relatively successful. It took a bit longer than anyone thought it might, but he put these two guys in charge. Eventually one of them became the CEO, the other one left, as you would probably expect. Joined JP Morgan, actually. And there is no indication that Buffett is like breathing down anyone's neck and second guessing any decisions.

[C]

I mean, he's literally too old. Like, we're just lucky. He is in fact breathing right.

[D]

So you can hold on into old age. But yeah, broadly speaking, we have this sort of gerontocracy in the Senate and in the CEO suite. Like, if you look at the media and age of CEOs, it has been going up for 20, 30 years and it should start coming down. But, yeah, I don't see any indication that it will.

[C]

But is that a good. Well, I guess you didn't really. You didn't answer. You're just, you're not taking.

[A]

No, I did. I took a stance.

[D]

I said it should start coming down.

[C]

That is what you believe should happen or that is what you think, McCann.

[D]

No, normatively, it should. Right.

[C]

The CEOs, younger leadership.

[D]

CEOs should step down for no reason other than that they have reached retirement age and boards should Be like, dude, you're 65. Can you, like, you've made your money, you've made your mark, can you retire now? And they should be a little bit firmer about that rather than going, oh, but you're so good, we want you to stay on. Can you have a few extra million dollars? The norm, The CEO reaches 65 and retires, which was the case in the previous century, has eroded various medical advances, if nothing else. And the CEO classes are physically healthier now than they used to be. And they can operate at a high level past that age. And I can understand the argument that if I can, why shouldn't I? But yeah, no, I do like the idea that senior ranks of companies should be a little bit younger than they are.

[C]

There was an interesting study I wrote about earlier this year that said one of the reasons CEOs are getting older is because a good chief Executive officer needs to have like a varied experience. Like, for example, like these guys at JP Morgan. Like one was mostly has trading experience, so now he's going to the commercial banking side to get experience there because you want to like, understand the whole operation. But I believe what the study found was that that's harder for executives to get now because they like bounce around more. But they bounce around in the same narrow field. It just takes them longer to get the broad diversity of experience they need to become CEO. I mean, isn't it good for an older person to be in charge because they're more. That was part of this study too. Like, the older leaders tend to be more measured, they tend to be less volatile, more of a steady hand.

[D]

So if the archetypal Gen X CEO is Elon Musk, then yeah, we can do it with less of that.

[C]

Yeah, maybe it's fine for them to be old. I don't know.

[D]

I think what we do have right now is the manager. CEOs who are hired to do the job tend to be older and the founder CEOs who builds companies tend to be younger. And that's a weird sort of two track system. And I do think that at some point we want a little bit of convergence there.

[C]

Cool. That's fine. Everyone's getting older anyway. So what are you gonna do?

[D]

Every single person on the planet, Emily, that's a fact, is getting older. Yeah, that's the solution.

[A]

We should all just be able to

[D]

get younger rather than older. Can you imagine?

[C]

Well, imagine we could live to 200. Some CEOs do.

[D]

Oh, are we going to talk about Master Song? Is that your segue?

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

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[D]

Mas Hassan had one of his wonderful slide decks this week and I would highly recommend you check it out. Because it is glorious. But the slide deck starts with, I was going to retire, and now, fuck that shit.

[C]

Yeah, it really is related to our conversation. It really does flow nicely.

[D]

Massa Son will never retire. I mean, this is obviously true.

[C]

Why would he?

[B]

So what we're talking about is the new SoftBank slide deck. And son has a reputation for putting out these crazy decks, but maybe because this one didn't land on time, I thought this was satire for at least three hours. Even knowing that he puts out crazy

[D]

slide decks, Eggs don't matter, Elizabeth. Back in 2014, he made this argument, but I think he just. The AI pictures are just so much better this time than they were in 2014 that it went more viral. I'm not quite sure. So, yeah, Masesson's argument, and this is also related to Warren Buffett. Mazasan's argument is that on some level, he's a fund manager. People give him money, he invests money in companies, the companies do well, and so then his company does well, just like Warren Buffett. And I think he has quite explicitly considers himself to be like the Warren Buffett of Japan. What he then goes ahead and says, in a way that Warren Buffett never did, was, I am the goose that lays golden eggs. Warren Buffett would never talk about himself like this. Massive.

[C]

He would never.

[B]

I think we have to explain that this was part of the slide deck that son made that had a bunch of illustrations that you're absolutely gonna have to go to the show notes and look at the deck to understand the full kind of picture, the awesomeness of it.

[D]

He's like, look, I have laid three golden eggs, you know, and his arm is one of them, and whatever, it doesn't even matter what they are. And he's like, you are valuing my company at less than the value of the golden eggs.

[A]

And this is true.

[D]

Like the. The value of SoftBank. The market cap of SoftBank is lower than the value of the shares that Softbank owns. There's a massive discount. And he's like, this is dumb, because not only should you be valuing the company at the value of its holdings, you should be valuing the goose eggs. Don't lay eggs. This is my favorite slide in the whole thing. Geese lay eggs. If you are a goose that has the ability to lay golden eggs, you should be valuing that. You should be valuing SoftBank not at a discount to its holdings, but at a premium to its holdings. And he's like, I'm going to create $6 trillion worth of value over the next 16 years. So you should bid Softbank shares up to the point at which you're pricing in some of that future value creation. Because I am a goose that lays golden eggs.

[C]

Makes complete sense.

[D]

And so here's my question for you, Emily. Is Masa son a goose that lays golden eggs and should that be valued?

[C]

I don't believe that he lays the eggs, Felix. Thank you for asking. I think his metaphor analogy is good. What matters is not the eggs. Eggs don't lay eggs. These are facts. Okay? Eggs don't lay eggs. I know that and I'm glad he told me, frankly. But Softbank does not lay eggs. Softbank buys eggs, right? It goes out and it finds interesting eggs and it, it purchases as purchases the eggs. It doesn't lay em. It doesn't create the eggs. SoftBank has a big stake in OpenAI, I believe.

[D]

Didn't it lay WeWork? WeWork could not have happened without Softbank.

[C]

And that was a stinky egg. Okay. But yeah, I think it overstates it to say that they're laying the eggs when they're really just buying the eggs.

[B]

To extend the metaphor though, if using this analogy, Sohn is the goose and he has all these eggs and Sohn is what's bringing down the value of these eggs according to the market. You should maybe just get rid of the goose. Right?

[A]

The market.

[D]

No. Is not saying that Masra is bringing down the value of the eggs.

[B]

And but they are implying it because anytime a fund is trading at a discount to its net asset value, the problem is they're really betting on the fund manager and their future judgment because they can already evaluate how much the assets are worth and they've decided that the fund is worth less.

[D]

Yeah, yeah. They're saying that SoftBank is trading at a discount to its assets, but they're not saying that the assets are worth less because they're owned by Mazda.

[B]

The value, or lack of value is in the fund and the fund manager, not the underlying assets.

[D]

Exactly. So the market has never really rated Massa as a fund manager, even though as his slide deck shows, he has actually been quite good at being a fund manager. He made that massive bet on Alibaba, which turned out to be great. He's made this massive back bet on arm, which turns out to have been great. What's interesting to me is that if you look at the sort of substance of the deck and like his vision for the future and where the $6 trillion of value is going to come from in the future, his thesis is basically the Elon thesis, the Tesla thesis, which is it's all going to be in humanoid robots. Humanoid robots are going to go out and do all of the jobs that are too dangerous for humans to do or that there just aren't enough humans to do and that is going to cause a massive productivity boost and everyone's going to make trillions of dollars. And he is saying that Softbank is positioning itself for this future of what he calls artificial superintelligence. And that's interesting to me and maybe it is. But I feel like if we do get intelligent humanoid robots, they're either going to be Chinese, like the base case scenarios are going to be Chinese. And the second case scenario is that they're going to be Tesla. And I'm not sure that Softbank is going to be involved either way.

[F]

I don't know.

[C]

I mean we're definitely going to get humanoid. I hate that word. Humanoid robots, I think. Nvidia this week announced new chips they're making for humanoid robot. They don't call them humanoid, they just call them humanoids. I just. Can we find a different. I mean wasn't robots a fine term? I don't know. But yeah, you may be right. I don't think it's clear yet who, who comes out on top of the humanoid revolution.

[B]

I think contextually though it's important to note that Sohn has always in his decks predicted these incredibly sci fi like things that are going to happen and sort of just in a stop clock way some of them probably will. But like if you go back to his 2010 deck, you know, some of his predictions are brain computers and one slide says bring brain computer to life.

[C]

We have that now.

[B]

Cloning.

[G]

Yeah.

[D]

Neuralink. It's the thing like he is basically Elon.

[B]

It is neuralink to some extent. But he in the 2010 deck, he also says he thinks humans will be able to communicate via telepathy this way.

[C]

That's true.

[D]

I can read Emily's mind.

[C]

That's true.

[B]

I also love he articulates Softbank's values. And number four is think till our brains crush.

[C]

That's what I do to prepare for slate money.

[D]

You don't want to be near Emily when her brain crashes. It's a sight to behold.

[C]

What matters is not the eggs.

[D]

I also disagree that eggs don't lay eggs on a certain way. I think that one.

[B]

Oh longer term I guess they do.

[C]

I guess that's true.

[D]

Nvidia, the most valuable company on the planet, has spent the past five years laying eggs and has done very well at it. Like, all of these great AI companies that are being birthed in a very large, meaningful way have been birthed by Nvidia. Nvidia has.

[C]

Nvidia is a goose.

[D]

Well, it's also an egg.

[C]

Well, which came first?

[D]

Which came first, the goose or the egg?

[C]

But if an egg becomes a chicken, it does in fact lay eggs after that. It depends on what kind of egg exactly.

[D]

Nvidia is an egg that became a chicken.

[H]

Right.

[C]

So they're like the fertilized eggs. So you have to make that decision.

[D]

Can we move on to the numbers round?

[C]

Because I just had one more thing I wanted to say, which is I like these slide decks that are just fun. Instead of being all nerdy with, like, data and incomprehensible charts.

[B]

This is just incomprehensible. Generative AI.

[C]

No, but like, they're like little poems.

[D]

There was that wonderful one. I put it in my newsletter back in 2020, where he showed unicorns descending into the valley of Coronavirus and then flying out on wings.

[A]

I'm like, unicorns on wings?

[D]

Yes.

[B]

We need more whimsy in our investor upd.

[D]

All right, now we can have a numbers round. As a German, I'm going to kick off with 59, which is the percentage of Deutsche Bahn trains that were on time in February. Deutsche Bahn, of course, being the railway passenger rail system in Germany, the biggest passenger rail system in Europe, if not the world. Well, not as big as China, but definitely in Europe. And this country that is famed for its efficiency and punctuality is just. I mean, it has become a national joke. It is terrible. The news hook here is that on Tuesday night, the entire system just ground to a halt. Not a single train moved for over two hours. And it took them forever to recover from it. And the reason was that the whole communications system that keeps Deutsche Bayern going so that everyone knows where the trains are, and all of that is built on 2G.

[A]

Remember 2G from, like, cell phones, like,

[D]

a million years ago. It's all built on 2G. And they were trying to, like, roll out a software update or a patch or something, and the whole thing just broke. And they're literally buying old 2G companies just so they can keep on producing the old components, so that they can keep on trying to patch this 2G system and eventually they'll move to 5G. But apparently that's not going to happen until, like, 2037 or something. Yeah, it's.

[C]

So should Germany just bring back fascism to get the Trains to run on time? Is that what you're saying, Felix?

[D]

No.

[C]

Is that the between the lines?

[D]

That's the Emily take, right? Bring back the draft, Bring back fascism and. Yeah, exactly. No, I'm just saying it is a bit of a national embarrassment. And lots of people are talking about what a shit show the United Kingdom is, but other countries are kind of falling apart as well. Yay. All right, Elizabeth, what's your number?

[B]

My number is 11, and that's dollars. And that is how much parents have to pay. Did have to pay on Ryanair to sit with their children. And Ryanair also required parents with children under 12 to sit next to them. But in order to do that, you had to pay this child tax. So people are mad about it. And Ryanair is being forced by the courts to roll it back. I mostly think that's bullshit. But the fee, not the court's rolling it back. But then I also sort of deal with this problem every time I fly with my kid, where we always get assigned seats at the last minute, especially on smaller airlines. And then you have to go through this epic process of either trading seats with somebody or changing tickets at the gate. And because the system will not let you just say, I'm Traveling with a 10 year old, can you just automatically put me next to them? It just doesn't work that way. So I would probably pay $11 just to not have to deal with that.

[D]

I've heard people talk about this a lot. Normally when I book a plane ticket, it offers me the opportunity to book my seat when I book the ticket. Do you not have that opportunity?

[B]

It depends on which class you're flying in. If you're flying economy, it usually doesn't if you're flying economy. Plus you can fly economy.

[A]

I'm not that rich.

[D]

There's something called basic economy where you can't choose your seats if you fly basic economy at that point. The whole reason why basic economy is not economy is that you don't get to pick your seats. And if you're flying with a kid, then you do need to pick your seats. Therefore, you should be flying economy and not basic economy. That's like. It's the American Airlines way of charging $11 to sit together. Only instead of charging $11 as an extra fee to sit together, they just have a discount for not sitting together.

[C]

Ryanair seems like they messed up what a lot of companies are really good at, which is like hiding fees.

[D]

Exactly.

[C]

Clever ways, maybe.

[D]

Exactly.

[C]

What an outrage.

[D]

Outrageous. Emily, what's your number?

[C]

My number is 1299.

[D]

Is that a price in dollars?

[C]

Yeah, it's $1,299. That is the new price of the MacBook Air 512GB. Because Apple announced this week that it was doing these quite substantial pricing computers. Yeah, 20%. And the reason is, and we've talked about it before this, the surge in demand for storage and memory in computing because of AI. So everyone talked about the AI job apocalypse, but what has happened instead so far is the AI inflation apocalypse, because this is AI inflation. AI has driven up demand for memory and storage chips and that has raised Apple's costs so much that it is now passing on these quite big price increases to everyone.

[D]

I bought myself a Mac Mini in January and I went back yesterday to see how much it would cost today. It's not even offered anymore. I bought this Mac mini with 32 gigs of ram. You can't even buy it with 32 gigs of ram anymore.

[B]

Yeah, I think that's because everybody was using that. The power agent, agentic AI, a bunch of.

[D]

But it's not just computers. If you look at the Xbox, Microsoft has raised the price of the Xbox three times in 13 months. The basic Xbox that was $500 when it was released is now $800. This is the first time in my lifetime, or possibly ever, that consumer electronics have gone up in price.

[C]

IPhones are going to get more expensive, too. And that's. Yeah, so far. And this point was made. I heard it first from the wonderful Axios's own Courtney Brown, who came to that epiphany yesterday and has a story out on Friday about it. That AI is leading to inflation instead of job loss, which is interesting.

[D]

Yet more reason for Kevin Walsh to raise rates.

[C]

Or not. Maybe that's productivity, right? Sometimes inflation comes from productivity.

[B]

We'll never know because he's going to be very vague about it, a la Alan Greenspan.

[A]

I think that's it for us this week. Thank you for listening to Slate Money. Thank you for emailing us on slatemoneylate.com

[D]

thank you to Jessamine Molly for producing and if you are one of the elite, one of the beautiful, one of the fabulous PLUS subscribers, we have a Slate plus segment for you about meme stocks and what on earth is going on with Hertz, which is kind of wild. So if you want to nerd out about convertible arbitrage, that's happening over at Slate Plus. Otherwise, thanks for listening and we'll be

[A]

back next week with more Slate Money. Slate Money is sponsored this week by Bill, which is the intelligence finance platform that helps business and accounting firms scale with proven results. Bill is a leading provider of software that simplifies, digitizes and automates back office financial processes for accounting firms and small to medium sized businesses. What does that mean? It means they help businesses pay and get paid by ach, jets, credit card wire transfers. You name it.

[D]

It's secure.

[A]

It has AI powered accounts payable automation that erases the busy work from capturing invoices and processing payments. It syncs seamlessly with accounting software.

[D]

It does your 1099 tax filings. You name it.

[A]

It's an end to end workflow. Its customers come from all industries ranging from startups to established brands and nonprofits to accounting firms themselves. When business owners choose Bill, they aren't guessing. They're choosing infrastructure that is already proven by millions of users and over a trillion dollars in secure payments. Bill doesn't just move money, it enables the business's entire accounts payables workflow and it creates the ability for them to control their financial operations securely and at scale. So talk with a payments [e-mail] proven and get a $150 gift card as a thank you. That's bill.com proven.

[G]

Lamina mal steps into McDonald's, looks left, sees Pulisic, looks right, sees Jimenez, gives a nod to Ronaldinho in the corner with a FIFA World cup meal. Ronaldinho sees son in the booth. Son finds Beckham going for extra Big Mac sauce. He's got Davies at the table just behind him. Davey's going for his collectible cup, a steal by Henry, who pulls his own collectible cup. Collect one of nine legendary cups with a FIFA World cup meal. Participating McDonald's for a limited time while supplies last. All rights reserved. 2026 McDonald's at FIFA World Cup 2026.